Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  ‘My mother,’ she says. ‘You sit there. I go to her. I come back.’

  So I sit among chairs and sofas which seem like an extension of Meetra’s personality, upright even when dozing. And blow my nose and my breath comes back in a more tractable rhythm. I feel the hectic velvet of the upholstery under my palm and I am as glad of the firm uprightness as I would be with my hand on a sturdy horse’s flank.

  Now…I must stop sitting here in Lost Sock Land.

  I must not be like Dorothea in Middlemarch and spoil the plot by finding Mr Casaubon dead in the garden and falling into a fantod for several chapters. George Eliot should have been shot for that – but I don’t suppose there was anywhere else for her to turn in those days when, if you weren’t married, you were out, straitlaced and governessing. No.

  Yesterday afternoon, instead of sketching, I googled strategic solutions for confusion and I found 1) a free trial in Islamic decision-making by the rules of the Quran and 2) toxic office management and how people who feel alienated in the office environment are over-ambitious – which just seemed to me to be posing the victim as the perpetrator all over again.

  I don’t give a shit about over-ambitiousness; I don’t understand it – I don’t even know what it means, except that maybe Phoebe was an example of it. Then again, she may have been the victim of male ambition being favoured over female. Maybe it means that there are so many people in competition with one another that you’re superfluous if you don’t join the fray. You might as well mind your old warrior of a mother, blind in one eye both physically and mentally. You might as well spread yourself as thin as a smear of margarine so that you can disappear without even being thought about. Except by those, like Elspeth Roach, who like to see you ooze with the Vegemite through the holes of a Vita-Weat before licking you flat with their tongues. Except that Vita-Weat doesn’t have holes to ooze through anymore. After Google, I went out and bought The Art of War, but when I got to the bit that said that I should not encamp in low-lying ground, nor should I linger in desolate ground, I realised that the flat desert was my habitat and the advice was useless.

  I can hear an old voice delivering a tirade and giving Mahni a hard time, so I get to my feet.

  I climb the stairs.

  I go down a hallway and off to my right there is the bedroom where Mahni is trying to subdue an old person metamorphosing, like Kafka’s Gregor, into a giant cockroach with several thrashing legs. I enter the room and subdue the left side while Mahni subdues the right. We really need a third person to take up the spoon and administer her medicine, but there isn’t one, so I kind of straddle the poor old cockroach while Mahni gets the lid off the bottle, fills the spoon and tries to get it past the clamped tight lips.

  ‘She no like,’ says Mahni.

  ‘I can see that. What’s her name?’

  ‘Sultana.’

  ‘Hey, Sultana,’ I croon, ‘Sultana. There, there, everything’s all right.’ She thrashes about for a bit, then brings her fierce old eyes round to focus on me. For a moment she freezes, but then I feel her give a bit under my grasp.

  ‘Sultana…’ She relaxes a bit more, taking me in. I smile. ‘There, there…’ I say. ‘Easy breathing now, like this,’ and I slacken my grip and show her. ‘In: one, two, three. Out: one, two, three, four, five.’

  ‘Nurr-ise?’ she croaks. It’s a marvellous, crackling old croak, worthy of tin-plated insides.

  ‘She think you nurse,’ says Mahni.

  So I nod and demonstrate the breathing. She cackles and breathes back at me.

  After a minute of easy breathing, keeping her eyes on me, Sultana eases her mouth and, in a sideways kind of way, siphons up the sticky stuff from the spoon. That done, she licks the remnant out of the creases around her lips and asks Mahni – or I think she does – who I am.

  And that is how I came to inveigle myself into Mahni’s home to sit out my dilemma in an odd kind of peace. I had packed my bag to go back down to the country but I won’t need to do that now. I can be here, where Stella needs me and where I can be of some use to Mahni.

  Over the dressing table in the guest room, I found a little mirror, hanging from a nail. I looked because I like to know how things are hung. Such a lot can ride on a nail, driven bingo, bango into a wall, fingers crossed, hope it won’t fall. When we started out at Mad Meg, we thought we were smart, covering the walls with chicken mesh until one night, during an over-ambitious hang, the lot came down on top of us. The life of an artist is studded with nails: the victorious, the priapic, the loose and the droopers.

  On the other side of the mirror, my face, the covering on sixty-plus years of history with two wire coathangers clanking in an empty wardrobe behind me.

  The house is spick and span. There’s a little woman who comes in to clean. She is a relative, newly arrived from Afghanistan and she looks like Meetra, but is utterly unlike her in mien. All she seems to do is hover on the staircase with a cleaning cloth in her hand while Mahni does everything. Everything. Her usurped afternoon tea with me was the longest break I’ve seen her have. She cooks, she cleans, she shops and she is at Sultana’s beck and call. It’s as she said, Meetra works all the time. During the day she works at the university. After work, she goes raising funds for her organisation. She gives lectures, she has meetings; she is on the go all the time. Even when she is home, Meetra is working. She is breathtaking in her stamina and more admirable than almost anyone I know.

  She plays a straight game. It’s easy to see what incenses her, but she is fighting from inside a situation so it isn’t easy for her to see how she is seen and that is a problem for her: she doesn’t say what people want her to say, she says what she thinks. I’ve tried, without a lot of success, to direct her attention to the receiving culture and the need to deal with humanitarian issues that arise within its jurisdiction. I’ve told her about dear old Beryl Blake and how she used to harbour asylum seekers.

  ‘Doctor Blake!’ she said. ‘So ugly!’

  ‘Oh, but we loved her! She was very, very kind.’

  ‘She drank too much.’

  ‘We all knew that.’

  ‘She should have had more confidence in herself. She had a brain.’

  ‘Well, we all have weaknesses. I liked Beryl. I liked her a lot…’

  ‘Hoh! I did not really know her.’

  ‘Well, Beryl was never going to be conventional. She was, as you say, terribly badly served by her maker but you mustn’t underestimate the good things she did. She ran a public garden and hid illegal immigrants there in the time of the White Australia Policy. There was rioting in Malaysia and discrimination against Chinese Malays. They were terrorised, their homes were burnt, they were denied work. Naturally enough, if they had the chance to come to Australia for an education, they overstayed their visas until they could apply for citizenship. Beryl set up a hut for people in this position. It was supposed to be a gardener’s hut, but it smelt of delicious Chinese cooking. You’d walk past and hear those stilted, staccato sounds that the Chinese make…’

  She threw up her hands. ‘I don’t like it,’ she said. ‘This visa overstay. It causes too much problems for people waiting in the camps.’

  ‘I don’t think the people Beryl helped were hindering anyone in camps. It was the White Australia Policy. These people were Chinese Malays, mostly.’ But she wasn’t hearing what I had to say about Asian immigration in the nineteen-sixties: as far as she was concerned, in the two thousands, refugees from the camps should come before asylum seekers. ‘Being in a refugee camp, you lose your human rights. You lose completely the rights. You’re not allowed to go out, you’re not allowed to talk and you’re not allowed to eat, even, because you eat what you get when you get it. The people who run the camps decide what’s to be done with the aid. Example, if UNHCR is taking shoes for children, at the door, the guards say, “Oh, thank you very much. Give it to us. We distribute to them.” And they take the shoes back to the market and sell them. And poor children, they’re walking w
ithout shoes. I got so many examples to give you. I’m supporting those that are in the camps. What we do is, especially Afghan refugees, they should build shelters inside of Afghanistan, especially Australia should build them. The Australian national plan, they should build shelters in different areas and take these refugees from the refugee camps, from Pakistan back to Afghanistan and resettle them somewhere, right?’

  She is obdurate and in her obduracy she keeps forgetting to ring the Afghan embassy to find out whether Eli has a visa. She had forgotten come Friday and left it too late to ring and I had to stew all weekend.

  I want Eli to succeed in his life, to be happy again, but his problems have been enormously disruptive. What if all this time, my hard-won support has just been feeding a habit? I want to paint without strictures before I die; I don’t want to have supported a son’s drug habit with money I ought to have been directing towards my career. I find myself fretting and angry at one and the same time and I’m trying to get through it by focusing on the here and now.

  The mornings begin at five a.m. with the cry of ‘MEEEEETRA!’ issuing from The Grand Sultana’s bedroom and a stream of clashing cymbals and tinkling brass in the mother tongue. Mahnaz tells me that the meaning is along the lines of ‘The sun’s up! What are you doing still asleep? Can’t you see the sun? Start up the car. I want to go for a drive.’ Sultana wraps up her things in a headscarf and attempts to rise from her bed, crying out the equivalent of ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’

  The equivalent of ‘Stop driving us crazy!’ comes back. But crazy is irrelevant to Sultana. The world is at her command. And frailty is not a word to describe her. She hasn’t broken her leg or dislocated her hip; her difficulty in leaving her bed is down to her shape. She is rolled up in a ball with her feet and the fingers of her good hand darting from the package.

  Meetra might be the person summoned by The Grand Sultana but it is Mahni who comes, inevitably. Meetra spends her early mornings singing, out of reach (and out of tune). ‘Yes, I sing,’ she explains to me, ‘because I cannot. I do it on my own, first thing.’ And she smiles her Meetra smile, the one you wouldn’t cross, an alloy of mystery and confidence. She is as steely willed as her mother. And so blinkered by her vision for her country that by the Monday evening I thought she’d entirely forgotten her promise to me. Did they give my boy a visa for Afghanistan? Why, after she told me she’d have the answer in a day, was it taking so long?

  At the dinner table on Monday night, she announced without ceremony, ‘Hoh! He is in Afghanistan. He went from Indonesia. They checked for me.’

  Anything might have burst from my over-stuffed emotional state but in the event I spouted, ‘I’d no idea he went to Indonesia first!’

  ‘See,’ she answered. ‘What I told you? DFAT, bah!’

  ‘Well, yes, it’s true, Meetra, that you found out in a few days what the Victoria Police and DFAT have failed to discover in three months; you are a gem. But why Indonesia?’

  ‘You have to ask your son.’

  ‘Well, thanks. Yes. But I have to find him first.’

  ‘I told you. Off-gone-istan.’

  I barely know where Afghanistan is located on the globe, let alone how large or how penetrable it is. Meetra and I are wrestling with Sultana’s bed linen while her highness sits in a chair, kicking the air, going, ‘Hoh! Hoh!’ in short, sarcastic gutturals. Just as well mine is only observer status or I would go, ‘Hoh!’ right back at her, loudly, in her face.

  ‘You come with me. We are going. It doesn’t cost much. Your boyfriend, your niece, they can look after your mother.’

  ‘Come with you?’

  ‘Sure. You come. What else you do?’

  ‘But there’s my niece’s mad father…’

  ‘Mad father, bah! People are only mad if they want to be! I know this. Mad? It’s an excuse. Like Taliban. Excuse. Just want to hold on to old situation: where there are kings, there are servants. Hoh!’

  ‘That doesn’t make it any easier to deal with!’

  ‘Look, madame, what you want? Give in to madman or find your son?’

  ‘Are they the only choices?’

  ‘What else? Step outside yourself? Be someone else? How possible?’

  So it looks as if I’m going to go to Afghanistan with Meetra, come self-harming by Stella or suicide bombing by David. We put her ‘Hoh’-ing mother in a Jason recliner with a stack of advertising brochures beside her and say the equivalent of ‘Look, bargains!’ which gets her avidly turning over the pages, her old eyes fairly on fire and a deep-seated desire for any variety of cut-price consumer goods burning in her breast.

  It will be weeks before Stella is strong enough to go back to Redeemer. She needs close care and rehab. Soon they will move her away from her revolting companion with his festering shins and into the rehab hospital she was in after her bout of numb-onia and Audra will be turning up and kidnapping her.

  Once David realised I wasn’t home, he went back to hassling Wendy, who, rather than call the cops, adopted admirable, recumbent ‘bugger him’ tactics. She demonstrated that if you lie down, start filing your nails and saying ‘bugger him’ to yourself, he eventually does leave. Except he doesn’t seem to do the same for me. ‘Stop rewarding him for visiting!’ was Wendy’s advice. ‘He wants you to be afraid.’ Is that all? You just have to be amazingly relentless and wonderfully unrewarding to visit. David doesn’t dare hit Wendy. Beyond her relentlessness and lack of reward, there seems no other reason. Or is there something else about her? When I went to their home, I found her sitting surrounded by black nail polish and punk hair spritz for her new short cut – how on earth had she managed to stun him into leaving her alone with just those defences?

  An eccentric kind of neatness reigned in the house with Nin not there. The haphazard element was gone and in its place, geometry and colour. Nothing slid off anything else – all was stacked: tangerine, lime green, fluoro blue, taupe. ‘I have to say, Wendy, you’ve got the place looking…well…’

  ‘Neat,’ she answered. ‘I have to say, Isobel, you never taught that dear child neatness. You never made anyone put anything away after they’d finished with it, did you?’

  ‘Well, you see, I don’t understand “away”, Wendy.’

  ‘Weak as piss. This is away,’ and she revolved a well-articulated wrist to indicate what she’d done to the room. ‘The tip-up truck and a pair of handlebars with a bell rusted onto them are no longer preventing you from sitting on the couch; the tip-up truck is in the toy box and the handlebars are back on the bike and the bike is back in the shed. You should see all the things I’ve found since Nin and Dan have been away. You’ve no feeling for room, you lot. It’s why you need me.’

  Is that her secret? A feeling for room. Does that keep her safe while Nin and Stella and I are in constant danger of copping it because there was always something or someone else to cram in?

  ‘But you’d have to admit, Wendy, that it’s not a dominant trait. When Nin and Dan are here, it’s chaos.’

  ‘When Nin and Dan are here, I have my room and they have theirs. I’m not afraid of clutter, I just don’t like to be surrounded by it, so I keep my own little study apart – it’s enough for me. But I do sometimes go on the rampage and make them put things away so we can sit down, so we can have other people come in and get to the dinner table without being killed by toys.’

  A feeling for room and no fear – ‘It’s too late for us to change I suppose?’

  ‘And would it protect you if you did? You’re soft, Sibella, you and Nin – you’re play dough. By the way, David doesn’t know the name of the new nursing home you put Stella in,’ she laughed. ‘He was threatening to go on the rampage at Broadlea and I told him, “Good luck, then. They’re about to knock it down. Stella doesn’t live there anymore.” He wanted me to tell him the new place, jumping round like a frog in a cactus patch and I just said, “As if.”’

  ‘Did he come to see you?’

  ‘Nope. I went to see him. Knocked on
his door, barged in and gave it to him. Then I barged out again. Visitor prerogative.’ She looked at the fresh coat of polish she’d put on her nails and blew. ‘He doesn’t know Mick’s other name, either, or where he lives.’

  I hadn’t explained to her the situation with Eli but she let me do so without interrupting and when I’d told her about going to Afghanistan, she said, ‘Well, go! If you don’t go, you’re as weak as piss. The trouble with you, Isobel, is you’re afraid of opportunity. You’re always wanting to see everybody else having their turn before you’ll take yours…’

  ‘Hey, that’s not fair…’

  ‘Tis.’

  ‘Tisn’t.’

  ‘Tis. You’ve done your bit for the world, now do something for yourself.’

  ‘But who’ll look after..?’

  ‘I will, Nin will, Mick will…We all will…’

  ‘But she…’

  ‘Hates us? So what? She thrives on a good old hate, does Stella, you know she does. Piss off, Isobel. Just get your ticket to Afghanistan and piss off.’

  And that is why I find myself in this plane beside Meetra, pissing off. Mahni is booked in to have her womb unprolapsed when we come back and in the meantime we’ll just have to hope it doesn’t fall on the floor while she’s chucking Sultana about.

  Meetra and I have had our incipient thromboses massaged at Changi and in Dubai; I learned from a girl who sold me a nifty little tripod for my camera a stylish way of doing my headscarf. When we flew out of Dubai two hours ago, the tallest building in the world was a splinter in smog.

  I have been holding my camera up to the window on our way over Afghanistan towards Kabul, filming the strange, treeless, liver-coloured landscape that for all the world looks like an ancient woman’s deflated belly many years after giving birth to dozens of children. I’ve been looking for rivers, but I’ve seen none, just these gullies everywhere in what has to be run-off, I’m guessing, from the occasional yellowish pegged-out goat’s skin patch of snow…But oh, oh, oh, now I see – snow. Real snow, high, mountain-smothering snow on massive mountains and Meetra and I are circling above Kabul in a plane full of white-clad pilgrims returning home from Jeddah. Home. I shall have to practise this experience as home. I’ve been imagining lofty tents and Bedouins, paintings by Ingres and Delacroix and the rich, coloured life of Rupert Bunny. The scents of spice, and rose and jasmine but I know it’s going to be nothing like that, because that’s Morocco, not Afghanistan…